For this particular task I looked at a big production of The Hobbit trilogy. People love the trilogies of Lord of the Ring, and the Hobbit not only due to the effects, but also because of its beautiful sceneries. Once again however, we come to realisation that nobody ever thinks about how difficult it must be. Audience just wants to see the finished product, see it in Ultra HD in the comfort of their favourite armchair.
The production took place all around New Zealand and it lasted for 6 weeks. For the location shooting of this size there needed to be about five hundred men involved. Everybody had to be at the right place and at the right time to get into the right vehicle to get to the right location. It is a job that needs a lot of planning. The crew used a total of two hundred and forty five vehicles to get everyone and everything around. It was stated that it was more difficult because of the filming taking place in the middle of nowhere. A lot of locations were only accessible by a helicopter. Everything the cast and crew could possibly ever need during the time of shooting needed to be taken with them. It was all about forward planning; there was no space for any kind of errors. The crew had to bring their own generators to create electricity for everyone associated with the production, bring equipment to cook food, provide water and areas for people to sit down and eat. The bathrooms and toilets, weather cover and even the heating when it was cold and cooling when it was warm had to be provided.
“You don’t have to worry about actors leaving home for so many weeks, because we’re very very well looked after. The catering on these movies have been sensational.”
To make things easy for themselves, the crew made sure everything is on wheels, easy to pack up and ready to roll. The last thing needed was to waste time on packing and unpacking the same equipment over and over again, but in different locations.
In order to show how huge this venture was, I have decided to share a little bit of the statistics associated with filming the Hobbit trilogy. For the whole shoot the cast and crew had to bring with them: sixty kilograms of toilet paper, artificial trees, animals of all kinds e.g. sheep, chickens, goats cows pheasants, ducks and so on.
“It’s not just a small crew going to a few far away places, we’re literally occupying a space of two football fields.”
It is sometimes difficult to build sets, as they need to be built on rocks, or surface needs to be levelled, etc. The crew moved around seven thousand cubic metres of soil to level out the space, which needed to be done so all the trucks can park up without getting stuck so that everything would run as smoothly as possible without causing any delays.
When thinking about all these people having to get to these secret, hard to find, off the map locations one must think of a good way of communicating. To them it was not anything more than pointing arrows. Sometimes the simpler is better.
When shooting on location, the production has to have a strict time plan, which it has to stick to. It was stated that a lot of the time it comes down to hoping that the weather will be cooperating. There were several different spots, which had to be used for shooting, and there was no option as waiting around for the weather to change, not on a tight schedule like this one.
At one point of the production the cast and crew had to get to a part of a mountain, which had very fragile vegetation on it. They have decided to do as much as they possibly could to preserve all of it. For this they have built a huge ramp, so people would walk across it rather than the plants. This again comes down to the size of the team. A small group of people would not affect it as much as a crowd of five hundred people. That would leave it with nothing but mud covering it.
The films were shot by two groups who had to film two different routes. Everyday the second group had to show what they have done that day, in order to create shorts and get some scenes together and then send it off to Peter Jackson who was in group one, for approval.
As they were far from everything, they had to rely on satellite technology to communicate between each other. Half way through the shoot they have used about six kilometres of cable.
It is a lot of hard work when the shooting has to take place on location, however in the end people see the final outcome and are amazed. The crew also enjoy it as they get to see these amazing places and act in the environments rather than in front of an empty green space. The artists’ visions are still fulfilled because they find the places that are just how they imagined them to be.
“It’s been great to get outside, it’s been great to get that texture of middle earth into the movie, after many many weeks of shooting in the studio”
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